When providing footwear for small children, there are numerous factors that a designer must consider. It is desirable to provide a bootie that is soft, comfortable, easy to put on, yet securely fastenable about the child's ankle. While standard booties may be adequately secured to the child's foot, they have several drawbacks. When attempting to place a standard bootie on a baby, the youngster will often curl its toes or otherwise resist the effort, making it difficult to insert the foot within opening provided. Booties with large openings tightened by a drawstring or laces often suffer the major drawback of not being securely fastenable to the foot because the laces come untied. Thus, as a child crawls, rolls or walks about, the bootie may come off and become accidently lost.
Another major objective of a footwear designer for small children is to produce a shoe or bootie that is relatively inexpensive and simple to manufacture, since cost is often a major factor in the sales of baby footwear. Along these lines it is desirable to design footwear that can be readily produced with good quality control as to the size and appearance of the finished product. Booties fashioned from multiple pieces of material tend to suffer the drawback of inconsistency in size, shape and appearance due to variations in the assembly of the multiple pieces from bootie to bootie. The present invention describes a novel bootie construction fashioned from a single piece of material that seeks to address these and other problems found in conventional baby footwear.